At no other time did Suga need to battle so fiercely with her loneliness and her longing for her dead mother. Every time she went to the toilet she lost an alarming amount of blood, and she became too anemic even to stand.

‘You’re terribly pale … Is it really all right not to see the doctor?’ Many times each day Tomo would come to Suga’s bedside and ask such things, peering down at the paper-white face pressed against the pillow.

‘I’m all right, thank you. It’s always the same – another week and I shall be all right again,’ said Suga, looking up at Tomo feebly with eyes that had forgotten their usual gloom. To Suga, too, in her present weakened state, Tomo’s face as she leaned towards her seemed to have lost its customary watchfulness and to be filled with motherly affection.

‘Do you want to go to the toilet? You can’t get there by yourself. Hold on to me …’ Finding Suga with a grim expression and brows knitted with pain, trying to raise herself to her feet, Tomo hastened to support her by the arm.

‘Thank you, Ma’am … But don’t bother, I’ll get someone to help me …’

‘It’s all right! Don’t fret yourself.’

Tomo put her arms around Suga’s shoulders as she stood swaying on her feet. Clinging together, the two women staggered along the corridor, but after she had got Suga into the toilet Tomo suddenly noticed the bright red blood that had dripped onto the corridor floor and the hem of her own kimono. Her face twisted in a grimace as she gazed. The blood had come from Suga’s body. She felt ashamed and soiled. Then, as though to blot out that feeling, she was overtaken by an indescribable sense of pity.

She took a piece of paper from inside the front of her kimono to wipe up the blood. The drops stained the corridor floor, countless drops like small red flowers. Tomo crouched down and wiped them away one by one. She could hear Suga groaning faintly inside the toilet.

‘Are you all right? May I come in?’

The groans went on with no reply, so resolutely she opened the door and went inside.

III

The Stepsisters

Takao Shirakawa was lolling in a rattan reclining chair that he had taken out onto the second-story veranda of the annex of the house at Gotenyama. The room, a corner room facing southeast, was filled with sea air borne on the breezes that blew off the shore at Shinagawa and was the coolest in the whole large house. His grandmother had allotted it to him for his use when he came home from high school dormitory during summer vacation. He faced his university entrance examinations the following year, and she was concerned that he should have as comfortable a place as possible for his studies.